It’s hard to say which is worse: that so many prominent Democrats
believe they aren’t responsible for any of Washington’s gridlock—or that
they’d say these things anyway. Not all that long ago, a presidential
spokesman using this language would be talking about murderers who
hijacked airplanes or drove explosive-laden trucks into the barracks of
U.S. Marines—not political opponents with differing notions about
federal spending.

With suicide bombs going off daily around the world and funerals for
the Washington Navy Yard victims still taking place, one might expect a
modicum of rhetorical restraint from inside the White House. No such
luck. For five years now,such metaphors have been the cudgel of choice
for administration officials, along with their fellow Democrats on
Capitol Hill and journalistic fellow travelers.

It all starts with President Obama, who routinely accuses Republicans
trying to thwart his spending plans by putting “party ahead of
country.” Last January, when talking—as Dan Pfeiffer was this week—about
GOP insistence on trading spending cuts for agreeing to raise the
nation’s debt limit—the president said he wouldn’t negotiate with those
holding “a gun at the head of the American people.”

Joe Biden asserts Republicans are holding the country “hostage” with
their spending stance, and in a 2011 meeting with congressional
Democrats the vice president agreed with the suggestion that Tea Party
groups were “terrorists.”

On the House side, such talk has long been a staple for Democratic
Leader Nancy Pelosi, whose default argument on fiscal or economic policy
is to impugn conservatives’ patriotism. In 2008, she said it was “very
unpatriotic” for Republicans to balk at a big bank bailout. Two years
later, she lashed out at those resisting raising the debt ceiling: “Are
these people not patriotic?”

Let’s stipulate that this type of talk obscures, rather than
elucidates, the impasse in Washington. Let’s also stipulate, for the
moment, that the leaders in both major political parties actually care
about the country. So why has the budget process become an ongoing game
of chicken?

Why do Republicans keep insisting on extracting concessions from
Democrats in return for raising the debt limit, which, as Democrats
point out, merely allows the government the legal authority to borrow
money it’s already spent? Why do Democrats act as though refusing to
negotiate on Obamacare is something to brag about?

Let’s start with the Republicans:

Almost universally, they consider the Affordable Care Act, which
passed Congress on a party-line vote in 2010, a bad law. They believe
the administration is prevaricating about its costs, and that its
coercive aspects are anathema to a free people. Accordingly, many
conservatives remain convinced the law is unconstitutional, regardless
of the Supreme Court’s Talmudic finding to the contrary.

Republicans also can’t understand how the president can blithely
announce a delay in the law’s business-related requirements while
leaving the hated individual mandate intact. Republicans also point to
public opinion polls showing the law to be unpopular with a majority of
Americans.

Some of those reasons are lousy—declining poll numbers is a
particularly weak argument—while some are solid. None of them puts a
rational person in mind of a suicide bomber, however, which brings us
back to the Democrats. Why are they so adamant that they shouldn’t
negotiate with Republicans?

Part of the problem is that Obama and his White House minions have no
institutional memory. Obama recently told the Business Roundtable, “You
have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or
the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a
governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with
the budget and nothing to do with the debt.”

This claim is wrong. First of all, the president is asserting that
defunding the Affordable Care Act is unrelated to the budget or the
burgeoning national debt—but this is exactly what Republicans say
motivates them: ACA-mandated spending increases Democrats won’t
acknowledge.

Even if one buys the president’s argument that Obamacare isn’t
strictly a budget issue, the debt ceiling vote has been employed for 40
years—usually by congressional Democrats—to get leverage on policy
issues ranging from campaign finance reform to war in Southeast Asia.

But Democrats do have legitimate reasons for holding fast. One of
them is that setting budget policy under the deadline pressure of the
debt ceiling is bad governance. Why? Because Republican leverage hinges
on risking a defaulting on the nation’s debts, which would scare the
bejesus out of the world’s financial markets, harming—among other
things—the U.S. economy.

Democrats also argue that what Republicans are doing is fundamentally
undemocratic. The ACA was passed into law, and signed by a president.
Since that time, Republicans have recaptured the House, true, but
Democrats have retained their Senate majority in two subsequent
elections. Moreover, a Democratic president was re-elected in a campaign
in which the GOP nominee said he’d do away with Obamacare via executive
order his first day in office.

So it’s not that the Democrats don’t have a valid point of view. To
my mind, they have the stronger arguments, which is why all their loose
talk comparing Republicans to suicide bombers is so dispiriting. But
then, as Harry Reid said himself, this isn’t really about winning the
argument—it’s about winning the next election cycle." via Instapundit
.
==========================

"In a paradoxical way,Obama's re-election victory coupled withcongressional Democrats adding to their numbers may have helped Boehner.
Some of those wins came at the expense of the Tea Party, the
conservative movement whose affiliated House members have been very
willing to stand up to Boehner....

Despite complaints from conservative activists and bloggers, however, Boehner remains the most powerful Republican in Washington."

=============================

Comment: To clarify about landslide Nov. 2010 elections, it's very true most were elected to defund (not repeal, defund) ObamaCare. But they weren't elected by GOP efforts-they were elected by the Tea Party. The GOP didn't even want most of the people we gave them, hated having people who paid attention to voters. The GOP told them to shut up and sit down. The GOP House never once allowed an ObamaCare defunding measure to come to the floor. The gridlock thing mentioned in the article and and everywhere else is a charade by both political parties and the media. The GOP actually loves ObamaCare, has never wanted to repeal it since day one. The GOP has merged with democrats as junior members, loves all the same big government things the left does. They love Obama because he helped them beat the Tea Party in 2012 by allowing the IRS to be used against them. The TP was no threat to democrats, they only threatened the pathetic GOP. On the other side, when democrats spew violent rhetoric against imagined opponents, it gins up their base.

The
vast scale of the EU’s self-promotion was set down in a new ‘fiscal
factbook’ designed to shed light on how Brussels spends the billions it
receives from Britain and other member countries.

Small-scale
bills highlighted in the report include £160,000 paid towards a yet to
open fitness and rehabilitation centre for dogs in Hungary.

And
on a larger scale the report details how the ambitions of EU diplomacy
has seen 44 diplomats stationed in Barbados, one of Europe’s
less-troubled trading partner nations.

It also points to some of the widely-known but often forgotten aspects of EU spending condemned as driven by political folly.

Among
these is the annual budget of £150 million for ferrying MEPs and their
staff between the European Parliament’s two headquarters buildings in
Brussels and Strasbourg to appease politicians in Belgium and France. The
EU Fiscal Factbook, published by the TaxPayers’ Alliance at the Tory
conference, is likely to sharpen differences over Europe among the
party’s MPs. It comes at a time of deep anxiety over pressure from Ukip, which demands withdrawal from the EU.

The European Commission has told EU
members states they should contribute anextra £3.5billion to Brussels
this year to meet unexpected ‘legal obligations’.

The bail-out will bring EU spending this year to £126billion, 8.4 per cent up on the previous year....

Of
overall spending, £44billion this year will go on the Common
Agricultural Policy, the farm subsidy system often derided as the means
by which France shores up its rural economy.. The
CAP paid handouts of more than £250,000 each to 889 British landowners
in 2011, and more than £1million each to 47 landowners. The report
calculated the burden of EU regulation on the British economy at
£124billion, or £5,000 for every British household.

The
advertising budget included £15million on a Parliamentarium, opened in
2011 as a supposed tourist attraction, but described by critics as a
‘propaganda temple’.

The
cost of EU advertising was calculated in 2008 by the Open Europe
think-tank,and includes a broadcast channel, an opinion polling
organisation, films and huge numbers of publications, funding for
sympathetic pressure groups, and special publicity conferences." via Free Republic

"Sea ice extent in recent years for the northern hemisphere.
The grey shaded area corresponds to the climate mean
plus/minus 1 standard deviation."

"The plot above replaces an earlier sea ice extent
plot, that was based on data with the coastal zones masked out. This coastal mask implied that the
previous sea ice extent estimates were underestimated. The new plot displays absolute
sea ice extent estimates. The old plot can still be viewed here for a while."

"The ice extent values are calculated
from the ice type data from the Ocean and Sea Ice, Satellite Application Facility
(OSISAF), where areas withice concentration
higher than 15% are classified as ice.

The total area of sea ice is the sum of First Year Ice (FYI), Multi Year Ice (MYI) and the area
of ambiguous ice types, from the OSISAF ice type product. The total sea ice extent can differ slightly
from other sea ice extent estimates. Possible
differences between this sea ice extent estimate and others are most likely caused by differences in
algorithms and definitions. Some time in 2013 sea ice climatology and anomaly data will become available here." via Paul Homewood

Despite rising home values that
suggest a housing rebound on the Island, lenders filed 12,271 initial foreclosure cases here in the first eight months of this year, a nearly
53 percent surge compared with the same period in 2012, according to
data from real estate information firm LI Profiles, based in
Brightwaters.
Nationwide the number of initial filings dropped 34 percent during the same period, national data provider RealtyTrac reported....

The share of Island mortgages in distress is more than double the
national average,according to national data provider Lender Processing
Services, of Jacksonville, Fla. In July, 8.2 percent of all homes with
mortgages in Suffolk County and 6.1 percent of homes with mortgages in
Nassau County were in the foreclosure pipeline, compared with 2.8
percent of homes with mortgages nationwide, LPS reported. LPS collects
data from mortgage servicers. Its definition of foreclosure includes
cases that have been referred to bank attorneys but not yet filed in
court, as well as those making their way through the court system.

Experts say Long Island continues to
struggle with foreclosures for a complex set of reasons. They range from
New York's almost three-year foreclosure process -- tied with New
Jersey for the longest in the nation -- to Long Island's
riskier-than-average mortgage loans before the collapse of the housing
market in 2008. Another factor: the region's difficulties in bringing
back high-paying jobs. Nassau's median household income was $93,214 last
year, a decline of nearly 7 percent since 2008, according to census
data. In Suffolk, median income has dropped nearly 5.7 percent over the
same period, to $86,334."...

"The armed siege at the
Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi has focused attention on the al-Qaeda
affiliate, al-Shabab. When the attack happened, the BBC's Panorama
programme had been investigating the recruitment pipeline of young
Muslims through Kenya to join the Islamist group in Somalia.

I meet Makaburi in a fly-infested room not much bigger than a cupboard, in Mombasa, eastern Kenya.

It is not a place you would expect to meet a radical cleric
who describes himself as Kenya's number one target in the country's
fight to disrupt al-Shabab's recruitment network.

Makaburi, whose real name is Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, was
placed on a UN Security Council list which banned him from travel
outside Kenya and froze his assets in 2012.

The indictment describes
him as "a leading facilitator and recruiter of young Kenyan Muslims for
violent militant activity in Somalia," who has preached that "young men
should travel to Somalia, commit extremist acts, fight for Al-Qaeda,
and kill US citizens."

Makaburi makes no apology for his activities and believes
they are justified according to his own controversial interpretation of
verses in the Koran.

I met him quite openly at his home and travelled with him to a village where he prayed publicly in a mosque. Makaburi said accusations that he directly funds al-Shabab are false - but defended its right to use violence.

"Al-Shabab are using violence to stop their country from being invaded by people from outside," he said. "It's not the right of America or any other country to interfere in what they believe in or how they want to run the country."

He took me to an Islamic boarding school just outside Mombasa
where young Muslims, roughly between the ages of six and 10, some of
whom are orphans, learn to memorise the Koran by heart, and are fed a
particular interpretation of it by teachers who share the same views as
Makaburi.
He proudly pointed out that his young son is one of its students....

I interviewed two young Kenyan al-Shabab recruits who had travelled
through a network such as this one to join al-Shabab in Somalia. They
did not wish to be called by their real names. They had been promised money for their families back home and a place in paradise as a reward for their commitment.

When they arrived in Somalia, their dreams of jihad and glory were shattered.

Ali said he was 13 or 14 when he travelled to Somalia. He
described being forced to watch the beheading of a recruit who had tried
to escapefrom the al-Shabab camp in Kismayo.

"His hands and legs were tied behind his back. They made him
kneel down and then they took a very sharp knife, right in front of me,
and slaughtered him.

"He was screaming, like an animal, the way a goat can be slaughtered."

It was a shocking warning to others who might contemplate running away. Ali was traumatised by what he saw and still has nightmares about the horror he witnessed....

The key question is how these radical clerics are able to operate openly without being prosecuted.

In September 2012, Makaburi was charged with several counts
of incitement for his part in the riots following Sheikh Rogo's
assassination. He is currently on bail pending a trial.

The 120-page report found that proper procedure was followed and
assigned little blame for the worst firefighting tragedy since the
terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. All but one member of the
Granite Mountain Hotshots crew died on June 30 while protecting the small former gold rush town of Yarnell, about 80 miles north west of Phoenix, from an erratic, lightning-sparked wildfire.

The report provides the first minute-to-minute account of the fatal
afternoon. The day went according to routine in the boulder-strewn
mountains until the wind shifted at around 4pm, pushing a wall of fire
that had been receding from the Hotshots all day back toward them.

After that, the command centre lost track of the 19 men. The firefighters either ignored or did not receive weather warnings.They left the safety of a burned ridge and dropped into a densely vegetated valley surrounded by mountains, heading toward a ranch. The report states that they failed to perceive the “excessive risk” of repositioning to continue fighting the fire.

The command centre believed the Hotshots had decided to wait out the
weather change in the safety zone. They did not find out the men were
surrounded by flames and fighting for their lives until five minutes
before they deployed their emergency shelters, which was more than a half hour after the weather warning was issued.

Without the guidance of the command centre, the men found themselves in a location that soon turned into a bowl of fire. The topography fostered long flames
that bent parallel and licked the ground, producing 2,000-degree
Fahrenheit (1,093-degree Celsius) heat. Fire shelters, always a dreaded
last resort, begin to melt at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit (649-degree
Celsius).

As the flames whipped over the men, a large air tanker was hovering above. But perhaps because of an early miscommunicationabout where the Hotshots were headed, the command centre did not know where to drop the flame retardant, the report said.

“Nobody will ever know how the crew actually saw their situation, the
options they considered or what motivated their actions,” investigators
wrote.

Though the report points to multiple failures, investigators
approached the incident “from the perspective that risk is inherent in
firefighting”. They recommend that Arizona officials review their
communications procedures and look into new technologies, including GPS, that might help track firefighters during chaotic situations.

The Arizona State Forestry Division presented the roughly 120-page
report to the men’s families ahead of a news conference in Prescott.

The Obama administration lies
systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media,
the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

"It's
pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this
guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.

"It
used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic
happened, the president and the minions around the president had control
of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best
they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more.
Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to
re-elect the president.

He isn't even sure if the recent
revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National
Security Agency will have a lasting effect....

Holding court to a packed audience at City University in London's summer school on investigative journalism,
76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories
of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in
Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers
brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden....

He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal
and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh
made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib....

Hersh returns to US president Barack Obama.
He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the
US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is
worse than Bush.

"Do you think Obama's been judged by any
rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone
paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into
Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what
the hell does he want to go into another one for. What's going on [with
journalists]?" he asks.

He says investigative journalism
in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources
and a misguided notion of what the job entails.

"Too much
of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the
Pulitzer Prize," he adds. "It's a packaged journalism, so you pick a
target like – I don't mean to diminish because anyone who does it works
hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that's a
serious issue but there are other issues too.

"Like killing
people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't
we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why
don't we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don't we do our own work?

"Our
job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a
debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and
who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough. It costs money, it
costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people –
the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much
more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would …
it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

He says in some ways President George Bush's
administration was easier to write about. "The Bush era, I felt it was
much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in
the Obama era," he said.

Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.

"I'll
tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and
start promoting editors that you can't control," he says. I saw it in
the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the
desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors
want and the trouble makers don't get promoted. Start promoting better
people who look you in the eye and say 'I don't care what you say'.

Nor
does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden
files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.

If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn't stop with newspapers.

"I
would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all
over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just
do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's
what we're supposed to be doing," he says.

Hersh is
currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly
will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
says that the official account of the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden
in 2011 is ‘one big lie’. Seymour Hersh, 76, said that ‘not one word’ of the Obama administration’s narrative on what happened is true.

In an interview with The Guardian
published today, Hersh savages the US media for failing to challenge
the White House on a whole host of issues, from NSA spying, to drone
attacks, to aggression against Syria.

He said the Navy Seal raid that
supposedly resulted in the death of the Al-Qaeda terror leader, Hersh
said, ‘not one word of it is true’.

According
to Hersh - who first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing
the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which
he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting - the
problem is that the US media is allowing the Obama administration to get
away with lying.

‘It’s pathetic. They are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].’

The White House has refused to publicly release images of Bin Laden’s body, fuelling suspicion they are withholding information.

Although the White House said the
corpse was immediately ‘buried at sea’ within 24 hours of his death in
line with Islamic tradition, it quickly emerged that this was not
standard practice. It has also been suggested that the White House has changed its story multiple times, according to infowars.com.

They initially claimed that
pictures from the ‘situation room’ show Obama, Vice President Joe Biden,
Hilary Clinton and the rest of the security team watching the raid
live, when in fact there was a blackout on the feed.

Neighbours close to the Pakistani compound in Abbottabad also said they had never seen Bin Laden in the area.

Hersh said the American press spends ‘so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would’.

"“We
knew our Muslim neighbours all our lives,” Georgios says. He is a
Catholic. “Yes, we knew the Diab family were quite radical, butwe
thought they would never betray us. We ate with them. We are one people.

“A
few of the Diab family had left months ago and we guessed they were
with the Nusra.But their wives and children were still here.We looked
after them. Then, two days before the Nusra attacked, the families
suddenly left the town. We didn’t know why. And then our neighbours led
our enemies in among us.”

It is a terrible story in this
most beautiful of towns, with its 17 churches and holy relics and its
great cliff-side caves. Now the fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra – a rebel
group with links to al-Qa’ida – are surviving in the caves and shooting
down at the Syrian soldiers in Maaloula’s streets with Russian sniper
rifles. You have to run from house to house, and one bullet smashed the
windscreen of a parked car scarcely 10 metres from the balcony on which
Georgios was telling his awful story. Up the road, a mortar round –
apparently fired by Nusrah men – has torn a hole in the dome of a
church. The Syrian army says it has driven the Islamists from Maaloula,
which is technically true; but to leave the town, I had to ride in the
back of a military armoured vehicle. It is not a famous victory for
anyone.

Not one of the 5,000 Christian residents – nor a
single member of the 2,000-strong Muslim community – has returned.
Maaloula is, almost literally, a ghost town. Only Georgios and his
friend Hanna and a few other local Christian men who joined the
“national defence” units to defend their homes, are left. At least 10
Christians were murdered when the Nusra militia began its series of
attacks on Maaloula on 4 September, some of them shot – according to
Hanna – when they refused to convert to Islam, others dispatched with a
knife in the throat. And there is a terrifying historical irony about
their deaths, for they were slaughtered within sight of the Mar Sarkis
monastery, sacred to the memory of a Roman soldier called Sergius who
was executed for his Christian beliefs 2,000 years ago.

Hanna
says that before the war reached Maaloula this month, both Christians
and Muslims agreed that the town must remain a place of peace. “There
was a kind of coexistence between us,” Georgios agrees. “We had
excellent relations. It never occurred to us that Muslim neighbours
would betray us.

We all said ‘please let this town live in peace – we
don’t have to kill each other’. But now there is bad blood. They brought
in the Nusra to throw out the Christians and get rid of us forever.
Some of the Muslims who lived with us are good people but I will never
trust 90 per cent of them again.”...

It
is impossible, amid the bullet-whizzing streets of the town today,
talking to armed Christians whose emotions are incendiary, to gather up
the full – even accurate – story of the Maaloula tragedy. They say that
the church of Mar Taqla has been badly damaged, the altarpiece smashed,
Byzantine pictures destroyed, but even Syrian troops will not approach
the monastery today. When they briefly tried to help some nuns return
after the battle, they told me, Nusra snipers cut them down, many shot
in the legs as they helped the nuns to run away....

The Nusra men seemed to
take a perverse pleasure, not only in destroying Christian icons, but
household beds and chairs, perhaps in a search for cash.

Even
the exact number of deaths cannot be confirmed. But it is impossible to
believe, after these sectarian wounds, that Maaloula can return as it
was, a place of worship for Orthodox and Catholic but also,
intriguingly, for Shia Muslims, many of them Iranians who used to visit
the town to see its monasteries and Christian shrines.

A
Syrian general tried to explain to me later that I was not witnessing a
civil war, merely a “war against terror” – the stock government
quotation – and that Syrians were not sectarian. “In Latakia, we have
200,000 Sunni Muslim refugees living among Christians and Alawites and
there are no problems between them,” he said. This is true. And outside
Maaloula, several civilians claimed that the Nusra forces which invaded
the town – and which numbered 1,800 men, according to the Syrian army –
also killed local Muslims.

For several days, the Nusra
gunmen held out in the wreckage of the Safir Hotel before taking to the
caves.The Christians are now all refugees, some in the Christian Bab
Touma district in the old city of Damascus, others in Lebanon. But some
statistics, however loosely gathered, speak for themselves. Sixty per
cent of the Christians of Syria are now believed to have fled their
country." via Atlas Shrugs

"Over the last decade, progressives have successfully painted
conservative climate skepticism as the major stumbling block to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions. Exxon and the Koch brothers, the story goes,
fund conservative think tanks to sow doubt about climate change and
block legislative action. As evidence mounts that anthropogenic global
warming is underway, conservatives’ flight from reason is putting us all
at risk.

This week's release of a new United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change report opens another front in the climate wars. But
beneath the bellowing, name-calling, and cherry-picking of data that
have become the hallmark of contemporary climate politics lies a
paradox: the energy technologies favored by the climate-skeptical Right
are doing far more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than the ones
favored by the climate-apocalyptic Left.

How much more? Max Luke of Breakthrough Institute ran the numbers and found that, since 1950, natural gas and nuclear prevented 36 times
more carbon emissions than wind, solar, and geothermal. Nuclear avoided
the creation of 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide, natural gas 26
billion, and geothermal, wind, and solar just 1.5 billion.

Environmental leaders who blame "global warming deniers" for preventing
emissions reductions point to Germany's move awayfrom nuclear and to
renewables. "Germany is the one big country that’s taken this crisis
seriously,"wrote Bill McKibben. Other progressive and green leaders,
including Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Bobby Kennedy, Jr., have held up
Germany's "energy turn," the Energiewende, as a model for the world.

But for the second year in a row,Germany has seen its coal use and carbon emissions rise— a fact that climate skeptical conservatives have been quick to point
out, and liberal environmental advocates have attempted to
obfuscate. "Last year, Germany’s solar panels produced about 18
terawatt-hours (that’s 18 trillion watt-hours) of electricity," noted
Robert Bryce from the conservative Manhattan Institute. "And yet,
[utility] RWE’s new coal plant,which has less than a 10th as much
capacity as Germany’s solar sector, will, by itself, produce about 16
terawatt-hours of electricity.

Hayward and Bryce are two of the most respected writers on energy and
the environment on the Right. Both are highly skeptical that global
warming poses a major threat. Both regularly criticize climate
scientists and climate models. Both men are regularly attacked by
liberal organizations like Media Mattersfor working for organizations,
the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute, respectively,
that have taken money from both Exxon and the Koch brothers. And yet
both men are full-throated advocates for what Bryce calls "N2N" —
accelerating the transition from coal to natural gas and then to
nuclear.

By contrast, there are plenty of good reasons for climate skeptics to
support N2N. A diverse portfolio of energy sources that are cheap,
abundant, reliable, and increasingly clean is good for the economy and
strengthens national security - all the more so in a world where energy
demand will likely quadruple by the end of the century.

Why then is there so much climate skepticism on the Right? One obvious
reason is that climate science has long been deployed by liberals and
environmentalists to argue not only for their preferred energy
technologies but also for sweeping new regulatory powers

for the federal
government and

the United Nations.

But here as well, the green agenda hasn’t fared well.Those nations
that most rapidly reduced the carbon intensity of their economies over
the last 40 years did so neither through regulations nor international
agreements.Nations like France and Sweden, which President Obama
rightly singled out for praise earlier this month, did so by directly
deploying nuclear and hydroelectric power.Now the United States is the
global climate leader, despite having neither a carbon price nor
emissions trading, thanks to 35 years of public-private investment
leading to the shale gas revolution. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that caps and carbon taxeshave had much impact on emissions anywhere.

In the end, both Left and Right reject a more pragmatic approach to the
climate issue out of fear that doing so might conflict with their
idealized visions for the future. Conservatives embrace N2N as a
laissez-faire outcome of the free market in the face of overwhelming
evidence that neither nuclear nor gas would be viable today had it not
been for substantial taxpayer support. Progressives seized on global
warming as an existential threat to human civilization because they
believed it justified a transition to the energy technologies –
decentralized renewables – that they have wanted since the sixties.

The Left, in these ways, has been every bit as guilty as the Right of engaging in "post-truth" climate politics. Consider New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza's glowing profile of Tom Steyer,
the billionaire bankrolling the anti-Keystone campaign.After Lizza
suggested that Steyer and his brother Tom might be the Koch brothers of
environmentalism,Steyer objects. The difference, he insists, is that
while the Koch brothers are after profit, he is trying to save the
world.

It
is telling that neither Lizza nor his editors felt it necessary to
point out that Steyer is a major investor in renewables and stands to
profit from his political advocacy as well. Clearly, Steyer is also motivated by green ideology.But
it is hard to argue that the Koch brothers haven’t been equally
motivated by their libertarian ideology. The two have funded libertarian
causes since the 1970s and, notably, were among the minority of major
energy interests who opposed cap and trade. Fossil energy interests
concerned about protecting their profits,including the country'stwo
largest coal utilities, mostly chose to game the proposed emissions
trading systemrather than oppose it as the Koch brothers did.

As Kathleen Higgins argues in a new essay for Breakthrough Journal,
it's high time for progressives to get back in touch with the liberal
tradition of tolerance, and pluralism. "Progressives seeking to govern
and change society," she writes, should attempt to "see the world from
the standpoint of their fiercest opponents. Taking multiple perspectives
into account might alert us to more sites of possible intervention and
prime us for creative formulations of alternative possibilities for
concerted responses to our problems."

As Left and Right spend the next week slugging it out over what the
climate science does or does not tell us, we would do well to remember
that science cannot tell us what to do. Making decisions in a democracy
requires understanding and tolerating, not attacking and demonizing,
values and viewpoints different from our own.

Among comments: Two exchanges,one in which Michael Shellenberger again notes obstructionism of Sierra Club and NRDC; another from a Minnesota resident responding to the notion thatwind turbines in the Dakotas and solar fromthe Southwest can power the entire US:=====================
"Sure, I get it. But the U.S. today isn’t 1970s
Europe. Heck, Europe today isn’t 1970s Europe! I’d like to think we can
move from nuclear retrenchment to renaissance in both places. Next
generation reactors are promising, but not ready for prime-time. Maybe
there’s more going on in other countries like China to give us hope. But
since we’re not there yet, I’m not sure it’s helpful to frame
nuclear/gas vs renewables as an either/or contest.Technology tribalism
can only get you so far.

"There’s enough wind in the Dakotas alone to
power the entire US… and there’s enough sunshine in 100 miles by 100
miles of the southwest to do it all over again. Even if we don’t aim
for 100% renewables… 70 or 80 percent is easily within reach… especially
with the help of hydro and enhanced geothermal for base load supply.

We can do this people… just have to set our political affiliations aside and get to work.

And then there’s the reality that electricity does not work well for
many uses we have for energy. For example, nobody in the northern part
of the country - you know, where it snows regularly and often - heats
with electricity, simply because it’s too expensive compared to natural
gas. Then there’s the electric car, which is making great strides, but
is nowhere near what many users like me need: the ability to go 300
miles on a charge at 70 MPH with an SUV-load of people and stuff, then
be ready to do it all over again in 15 minutes, indefinitely. And there
are even harder problems: an electric-powered replacement for light
aircraft is a much longer ways off."...

Comment: Thanks to the authors for giving us a voice for at least a few minutes. Not mentioned is the global CO2 number which is said to be the problem. Assuming for the moment that human CO2 is killing the planet, China is the only country that can do anything about it. Everyone knows it, the numbers are public. US CO2 has plunged over many years (as the authors kindly note) and is now dwarfed by China's CO2. Nothing the US government can do at this point will significantly lower global CO2. The US gov./political class knows this but is enacting additional strict measures anyway against a population in a permanently depressed, part-time economy.

Lakim Faust had more than 100 rounds of ammunition when he started
shooting at people who were standing outside at a law firm and a
shopping center in June, authorities said.

A grand jury indicted Faust on 14 charges Monday, including four counts of attempted first-degree murder.

Faust, who is black, picked out his victims based on their race,
according to the indictments. The documents didn’t specify why Faust
wanted to shoot white people, and police have not talked about why he
picked out his targets. Earlier reports had indicated that Faust
was shooting “indiscriminately.”

Police said Faust’s first victim on June 21 was an insurance adjustor
in the parking lot of a law firm. He then crossed a five-lane highway
and shot three more people in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart,
investigators said.

Three of the four people wounded in the shooting suffered permanent
and debilitating injuries, according to the indictments. Details of
those injuries were not specified.

Mitul
Shah, 38, a sales executive from London attempted to strike a deal with
the terrorists, replacing children with himself, a heroic act which
gave several victims vital time to escape.

The
selfless father did not get through to the gunmen and was shot
alongside a number of children in the Kenyan tragedy, leaving behind his
wife and two-year-old daughter.

Today his employers, the cooking oil company Bidco Oil, and his work colleagues spoke of their grief at his loss.... Mr Shah, who was born in April 1975 in North London, held dual British and Kenyan citizenship....

Mr Shah, who leaves a widow, Rupal, and
daughter Sarai, was killed moments after he was helping 33 children
taking part in a TV cooking contest on the roof of the Westgate centre
in Nairobi. The event was being sponsored by his company."...via Free Republic

.
"But now that the Reykjavík mosque project has been given the
go-ahead, Tamimi's group has changed its tune and now admits that
foreign donors will be paying for the mosque's construction costs after
all."...(Are they opening up any new churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia?)

""The Muslim Association of Iceland
now admits that foreign donors will be paying for the mosque's
construction costs. The former mayor of Reykjavik says he believes it is
outrageous for the city to give Muslims a site at no cost at a great
location in the center of the city, and asks why political and feminist
groups are so tolerant of a religion that he says degrades women."

The Reykjavík City Council has approved a building permit for the construction of the first mosque in Iceland.

Members of the city council -- which is led by Reykjavík Mayor Jón
Gnarr, who identifies himself as an anarchist -- say they hope the prime
location will make the mosque a prominent landmark in the city.

Critics of the mosque, however, say the project is being financed by
donors in the Middle East who are seeking to exert control over -- and
radicalize -- the growing Muslim community in Iceland.

Although reliable statistics do not exist, the Muslim population of
Iceland is estimated to be approximately 1,200, or 0.4% of the total
Icelandic population of 320,000. Most Muslims in Iceland live in the
capital Reykjavík, where they make up about 1% of the total population
of 120,000.

The Muslim community in Iceland may be small in comparison to other
European countries, but its rate of growth has been exponential: Since
1990, when there were fewer than a dozen Muslims in the country, their
number has increased by nearly 10,000%. Much of this growth has been due
to immigration, but in recent years native Icelanders have also been
converting to Islam in increasing numbers.

The former group is run by Salmann Tamimi, a Palestinian immigrant who considers himself to be the voice of moderate Islam in Iceland; the latter group is run by Ahmad Seddeq, a firebrand preacher from Pakistan whose activities are allegedly being financed by Saudi Arabia.

Although both groups pertain to Sunni Islam, they have been openly
fighting with each other for many years over who should be the rightful
representative of Islam in Iceland.

In 2000, Tamimi -- whose group meets at a make-shift mosque on the
third floor of an office building in downtown Reykjavík -- submitted an
application to obtain a free plot of land from city authorities to build
the first purpose-built mosque in Iceland.

Not to be outdone, Seddeq -- whose group meets at a make-shift mosque
in an old concert hall near the Reykjavík airport -- submitted his own
application for free land to build a competing mosque.. City officials responded by saying there should be only one mosque
and that it should be shared by both groups. "Obviously we won't be
allocating two lots for mosques at this point and we find it natural for
them to cooperate on the construction of one mosque," Páll Hjaltason,
the chairman of Reykjavík City's Urban Planning Council, told the
newspaper Fréttabladid.

Seddeq said he was open to the idea of sharing one plot of land, but
Tamimi, who submitted his application first, would have none of it.
Instead, Tamimi lashed out at Seddeq, accusing him of extremism,
fanaticism and oppression in the name of Islam.

"Our application is completely different from theirs," Salmann said in an interview with the newspaper Fréttabladid. "This is like asking the national church to be with the Jehovah's Witnesses." .Tamimi sought to undermine Seddeq's group by accusing it of being
financed by Saudi Arabia. At one point, Tamimi called the police to
report members of Seddeq's group, accusing them of misunderstanding the
peaceful nature of Islam,and saying that he feared that Muslim
extremists were attempting to gain a foothold in Iceland.

Tamimi also sought to assure the Reykjavík City Council that --
unlike Seddeq -- his mosque project would not be financed by foreigners
and thus would not be promoting extremism.

"If we are going to have a mosque, it must be done according to local considerations," Tamimi said in October 2010. "As
soon as you lose sight of the source of funding you lose control of
what happens subsequently. The experience of other countries teaches
that it is wise to reject large foreign investments in religion. Such
investors are much more likely to import their own countries' traditions
and not adapt to the traditions in their host country."

In the end, city officials sided with Tamimi, whose mosque project
was formally approved on September 19. After more than a decade of
bickering, construction of Reykjavík's first mosque is expected to begin
in early 2014.

The cost of building the 800 square meter (8,600 square foot) mosque
-- which will include a prayer hall, community center and library, as
well as a nine-meter (30 foot) minaret -- is expected to exceed 400
million Icelandic Krona (€2.5 million; $3.3 million).

But now that the Reykjavík mosque project has been given the
go-ahead, Tamimi's group has changed its tune and now admits that
foreign donors will be paying for the mosque's construction costs after
all.

During a newspaper interview
on September 19 -- conducted just a few hours after the mosque project
was approved -- Sverrir Agnarsson, a convert to Islam who is chairman of
Tamimi's group, the Muslim Association of Iceland, was asked how the
mosque would be financed.

"We have received numerous promises," Agnarsson said. "We are mostly
seeking funding from individual foreigners. We have a right to get
support from the collective funds of Muslims [the Ummah,
or the worldwide community of Muslims]. We are doing all of this in
cooperation with the Ministry of Justice to guarantee that all the money
coming to us is received legally, and is not associated with any
terrorist organizations," he added.

The idea that foreigners are financing the spread of Islam in Reykjavík does not sit well with many Icelanders.

One of the most vocal opponents of the mosque project has been the
former mayor of Reykjavík, Ólafur F. Magnússon. In an article he wrote
for the newspaper Morgunbladid, Magnússon laid out his position:

It is a matter of grave concern that it seems to be no
problem for Muslims in Iceland to finance such a mosque here in Iceland
with money from 'Muslim/Islamic promotion organizations' abroad. They
could receive financial help from organizations that want to increase
Islamic influence in Iceland as well as in other countries. This can be
dangerous for our national culture and safety.

Magnússon also said why he thought it was wrong for foreign
organizations to be financing the construction of mosques in Iceland:

Islam is a religion with the goal to eliminate all other
religions and to expand all over the world, the West, the Nordic
countries…and now even Iceland. The experience in the Nordic countries
shows that Muslims are not adapting to society. This has become a huge
problem, in Malmö [Sweden] for example. The other day, a mosque was to
be built on Trondheim [Norway], but the Norwegian authorities canceled
the project because some Saudi Arabian organization was to finance the
whole thing.

Part of the answer may be found in the political make-up of the
Reykjavík City Council, which is led by the upstart Best Party, a
so-called joke party that was propelled into office in 2010 as a backlash against establishment parties in the wake of Iceland's banking collapse in 2008.

The Best Party -- a semi-serious far left party that is home to
anarchists, atheists, surrealists, punks and poets -- is being led by Jón Gnarr,
a stand-up comedian whose stated political aim is thoroughly to upset
the established order in Reykjavík. Critics say the new mosque
represents a big step toward achieving Gnarr's objective." via Free Republic